This month I’ve subscribed to CBTNuggets to get trained up on VMWare’s vSphere product. Especially the networking components. Along the way I’ve learned more interesting things – first of which is a open source iSCSI program that can provide remote storage. It is called OpenFiler and can be run on bare metal or a VM. A download can be had from here. It looks pretty handy, and reminds me a bit of FreeNAS.
Category Archives: Hardware
iSCSI
SD Card Formatting
At long last I am sitting at a desk working on my MacBook with the Raspberry PI running next to me. It is so cute, up and waiting with the command line interface. What should we do today? Well, what we do every day – take over the world! But first, we have to prepare for the unlikely event that we might possibly fail. If a failure were to occur it seems like a really good idea to have a <gasp> recovery plan. Since the RPI uses a MicroSD card for it’s boot partition I think I’ll start by having a couple of those ready to go.
The first step is to get a 4 GB or larger micro SD card. Check.
The next step is to format the card. Cool, so how does one do that? Why, by downloading the formatting utility from the SD Card Association, of course. From this link.
What about a NOOBS installer and Raspbian image? Well, download those from here.
Extract the files, copy them to the SD card and you should be good to go.
Raspberry PI Hardware
Today I’ve bumped across a couple of interesting tidbits for Raspberry PI Hardware.
First, the general purpose supplier (as opposed to Amazon, of course):
http://www.modmypi.com/
Second, the Raspberry PI does not include a real time clock in the base package. Naturally one can be added:
https://www.modmypi.com/blog/installing-the-rasclock-raspberry-pi-real-time-clock
Lastly, I may be developing a love for good keyboards. Here is a source of a premium keyboard:
http://www.pckeyboard.com/page/category/UKBD
As I discover future useful resources I’ll either edit this entry, or add comments to it. I sense a new category coming on too!